Days of Ignorance

by Laila Aljohani

  He knew she wouldn’t sleep. He also knew she wouldn’t talk. So, after turning off the lights in the room, he withdrew quietly and shut the door behind him.

  The darkness was so merciful when it brought Malek to her. She saw his face in the shadows that had flooded her room. She saw his finely drawn eyebrows. She saw his wide, slightly yellowed eyes with their thick, curved lashes. She saw his broad nose, his thick lips, and the deep scar that had been left on his chin by an old wound, and that had always captivated her. It was so-o-o-o-o-o deep, she could have stretched out and fallen fast asleep inside it without anyone waking her up, saying, ‘You’re disturbing the dead. Find somewhere else to lie down.’

  Was it necessary for her to think of him as a lifeless corpse on a back street of Medina in order for her to realize that her love for him had just been buried for a while under an accumulation of sorrow, but that it hadn’t died? Had it been necessary for someone to murder him in order for her to know that love was alive and well, pulsating deep inside her, and that she’d just lost the way to it?

  How long ago had she stopped telling him she loved him? And why had she stopped? Something deep inside had grown lukewarm from the time he’d surprised her with the story of ‘the absolution’, as he referred to the Saudi citizenship he so coveted. Her enthusiasm had waned. Her affection and longing had ebbed. She’d fallen ill, and hadn’t recovered quickly. Then the shock came to make her realize the heinousness of her surrender. That’s right. She’d surrendered to the silence that had stretched out wide and cold between the two of them. She’d surrendered to the birds of caution as they pecked at the heads of her words, driving them back into their hiding places. She had surrendered to the growing distance between them. And she hadn’t been able to resist a painful feeling that he had let her down.

  He’d called her often since mid-Sha’ban. He’d asked about her and told her that he loved her and missed her. He’d told her that he missed the two of them laughing together and talking about the world and its filth. He longed to see her go back to the way she’d been before, since he was the same as he had been before. He longed for her to try – just try – to forgive. But she hadn’t gone back to the way she had been before, and she hadn’t forgiven.

  She’d gone on talking to him half-heartedly, and even when he broached the subject of marriage with her father, she hadn’t felt happy. She was going through with it out of duty, plain and simple. She’d convinced herself that she wanted to marry him for the sake of what was past, not for the sake of what was to come. She’d been true to everything that had developed between them, and only in this way had she managed to accept the idea of a formal bond between them. It seemed strange to her that they had such different motives for wanting to make their relationship official. He wanted it so that they could be together the way he’d always dreamed of, and she wanted it so that everything that was past would have some meaning, since nothing that was to come mattered to her anymore. What was to come wasn’t hers any longer. She’d refused to let him touch her at the Dar Al Iman InterContinental, and that had been enough to convince her that something deep inside her was amiss. It wasn’t the way it had been before, and it might never be again.

  Oh, God . . .

  How had she thought about this while failing to notice that death can expose and rectify what, under ordinary circumstances, are the most rigid, obstinate, vainglorious of ideas? Death shook her up every time it came. And now, in the darkness of her room, she saw that she might never recover from the terrible realization of how cruel and foolish she had been.

  Ever since mid-Sha’ban she’d been thinking about what her brother Hashem might do. She hadn’t told Malek that her brother had seen her getting out of the pale blue Camry, or that she’d found him searching through her things and reading the letters they’d exchanged over the past few years. She hadn’t even thought of telling him. And why should she have? She’d expected Hashem to take his anger out on her alone. But her intelligence had betrayed her. She’d lost sight of the fact that her brother was a coward who wouldn’t have the guts to confront her directly, and that he would look for the most twisted possible way to ‘discipline’ her (read: hurt her).

  If only Hashem knew that he had not only hurt her, but had devastated her to the point where she couldn’t even cry anymore. Her eyes were dry, her heart was wracked with grief, and her spirit was full of yearning and distress as she prayed, ‘Look at me, Lord! I beseech you, God, deliver me from the state I’m in! Remove this heavy burden from me, and protect me from the evil that lies in wait for me – the evil of losing my faith in Your justice. Take my hand, God.’

  She closed her eyes, but the darkness had already taken up residence in her spirit. She felt the force of the throbbing in the right side of her head, and when her stomach began to churn, she realized that the migraine coming on was going to be a terrible one. However, it wouldn’t be any more terrible than the death that, as always, had come upon her unawares.

  Shiyar * the 17th of Wail,

  the twelfth year after Desert Storm

  7 p.m., the hospital

  Is he going to die?!

  She kept pacing, agitated, up and down the corridor. His head bowed, her father sat on a white chair saying la hawla wa la quwwata illa billah as she walked anxiously in and out of the room. It hadn’t occurred to him to get her out of the hospital for fear that she might lose her mind before his very eyes. She would have lost her mind if she hadn’t come here, and her whole life would have collapsed. Every time her father had come to the hospital over the course of the past two days, he had refused to go into the room where Malek lay. She glimpsed a tremendous sorrow in his eyes. She didn’t realize that he was terrified of her response, terrified of the moment when she realized there was no hope.

  There’s no hope. I’ve gone to hell.

  It was hell for her to see Malek slumbering in a world she couldn’t imagine. Why were they saying he was in a coma? He wasn’t in a coma. He was just sleeping from exhaustion, and as soon as he’d had enough rest, he would open his eyes. All she had to do was sit on the edge of his bed and wait for his return so that she could show him the way back to himself. Meanwhile, her father sat on a cold white chair, waiting and praying that she wouldn’t lose her mind.

  Leen, Leen, L-e-e-e-e-n! What a beautiful name you have! How did your father manage to choose it? Leen, Leen . . .

  But her name had died from the time when Malek had stopped calling her by it. His name had died, too, and it would be shrouded in this white coma. Who said comas were white? Who said comas had a color? Color! Color! Color, what have you done?

  Is he going to die?

  The doctor hurt her as he squeezed her wrist, shouting, ‘Stop panicking!’

  She looked at him gloomily and said, ‘But you didn’t know him!’

  She came rushing in to see him, to touch him. She saw them taking the dead from corridor to corridor. She was agonized by the thought that they were going to take him, too, to some place from which there was no return, to a place where he would become a little mound hedged in by black stones. She thought back to the little mounds that had spread out before her eyes as she peered through the Baqi’ Cemetery’s Eastern Gate one day. Lined up in rows side by side, they were separated by snaking pathways. There was nothing but a cryptic silence broken by the sounds of the cars behind her. That day, after seeing how people end up, she’d thought she would be able to endure any tragedy that might come her way. But the waiting and the uncertainty had devastated her: the waiting for him to wake up, and the uncertainty as to whether he ever would.

  When she saw Malek that morning, he seemed to be asleep.

  She nudged him gently, saying, ‘Wake up. You’ve got a long day ahead of you!’

  But he went on sleeping, and didn’t smile. She gazed pensively at his gauze-wrapped head and his body enclosed in splints. His right leg, his right shoulder blade and two of his ribs were broken. He was on the verge of death, but he hadn’t died. I
t horrified her to think that anyone would have the power to inflict this kind of harm on anyone – anyone at all! It horrified her even more to think that the person who had inflicted the harm was her own brother. She’d seen his violent side, but had never believed it would reach this extreme.

  She went back to studying Malek again. She studied the scar that plunged so deeply into the flesh of his chin. She’d fallen in love with that scar, and many times had prayed to God that the children she bore him would inherit it. When she told him this, he had a long laugh, and asked, ‘How could they inherit something I wasn’t born with?’ Nevertheless, she’d always thought of that scar as being imprinted on one of his genes, and that she had reason to hope. She placed her forefinger inside the scar’s deep hollow. The moment she did it, she choked on her tears as she whispered, ‘O merciful God, let me die, or let me wake up from this nightmare!’

  She wiped her tears, then went back to pondering his still, expressionless face. It looked devoid of all meaning, as though it had been extracted from one of the dissection manuals she’d often looked at as she searched through the university library in the course of her studies. She remembered the Arabic translation of the Sobotta Atlas of Human Anatomy with its mustard-yellow cover and its reddish-brown title, and all the explanatory photos and drawings that filled its three volumes.

  Dead people. Dead people’s bodies and faces.

  As she leafed through the volumes, she knew they were dead by the way their eyes had been drawn and the positions they were in. Dead people who’d been dissected slowly and deliberately, layer after layer after layer. First the skin had been stripped away so that the muscles could be drawn. How beautiful and symmetrical they were! Then the muscles were removed so that the deep fascia beneath them could be drawn. The deep fascia looked supple, moist and slippery. And at last there appeared the bones, white and glossy. On the way to the bones, these dead people’s skin, muscles, glands, veins, arteries and nerves had been removed slowly and carefully in order to reveal the bones’ white blades and cylinders with their various sizes.

  Bones, bones, bones. How bones had fascinated her! The thing that fascinated her most was dissecting the human skull. She would always recall the appearance of the three sutures drawn on the human skull: the coronal suture, the squamous suture and the lambdoid suture. Never, since the first time she’d seen them, had she been able to look at anyone’s head without thinking of rivers: tortuous rivers on the surface of the skull. Two of these rivers – the coronal and lambdoid sutures – are parallel, one of them at the top of the skull and the other at its base, while the third – the squamous suture – runs between them midway along each side of the skull. Sometimes she would take her fingertips and try to feel the places where the rivers in her skull ran, and even though she’d never managed to do it, she kept trying.

  She loved God with a passion after seeing those sutures. She loved a God who would cause three rivers to flow over a cranium. She smiled when she thought about the satellite photographs that have been taken of rivers on Earth, since there was no difference between the rivers on Earth and the rivers on the human skull.

  Oh, God.

  How had Malek’s blank face made her think about three rivers on a skull? She studied him for a bit, then reached out and placed her hand on his face. She let her index finger slide gently over the place where his palate bone was located: ‘the lizard’s body’, as it was referred to in the Sobotta Atlas. She knew she was touching the spot over his parotid gland, right below the ear. Then she passed over the condylar process. Finally she paused near the mandibular foramen. Meanwhile, Malek was slumbering, oblivious to the rivers atop his cranium, the two openings at either end of his jaw, and the blood that flowed through his jugular vein and his sciatic artery. He was oblivious to everything, and she alone sat before him, removing the skin, the muscles, the fascia, the veins and the arteries from his cranium in order to stand on the banks of its three rivers. She hoped against hope that he would wake up – just wake up – even if he didn’t know her, the one who had known him to the point of sorrow.

  She was terrified of his dying, of his turning into a corpse like the ones she’d seen when a friend of hers had insisted on taking her to the autopsy room at King Abdulaziz University’s Faculty of Medicine. There had been nothing but death there: faces submerged in a long, l-o-o-o-o-n-g slumber, and washed in medical solutions that would slow down their rate of decay. Decay, decay, decay!

  The decay might be retarded, but it was bound to happen. She’d been trying for years to escape it. But when she’d gone to the autopsy room that day, she’d suddenly realized how weary she was of resisting it. She came to this realization as she was pondering the lifeless body of an unnamed little boy. According to her friend, a student had managed to facilitate his purchase from a man who worked at a certain hospital morgue. The six-year-old boy had been brutally raped and had been dead on arrival. He stayed in the morgue for months without being identified by anyone. Then . . . he was sold.

  ‘My God, how could raucous laughter and hilarity have turned into a lifeless corpse that’s changed color from all the time it’s spent in a refrigerator? And how is it that no one identified him?’

  ‘Maybe his family was afraid of a scandal,’ her friend replied.

  She felt as though he’d died two grievous deaths. She couldn’t bear to look at his face, so she just looked at his plump little fingers and the black filth under his long fingernails. How strange, she thought, for a person to die, and for his fingernails to keep on growing!

  She looked at Malek’s fingernails. They weren’t long. It occurred to her to trim them from time to time to keep them from getting long. It’s only the dead who don’t have anybody to trim their fingernails for them. But he wasn’t dead. No, he wasn’t dead.

  8 p.m., the hospital

  One time Malek had said to her, ‘You’re really stubborn about your ideas.’

  She smiled impishly, raising her eyebrows. He acknowledged that there was nothing wrong with being stubborn if there was something worth being stubborn about. However, it turned into something offensive when somebody was just being stubborn for the sake of being stubborn. All right. Why was she thinking about her stubbornness now, in this room that was so unfamiliar to both of them, with Malek slumbering in his place of in-between-ness? What should she think about? About the first time he met her, weary and self-conscious, in order to tell her, ‘I love you’? When had that been?

  Oh, God.

  She’d been an insomniac for long nights after that. It had seemed strange to her to sense everything that was developing deep inside him, to feel the words teetering on his lips every time he called her, yet without his saying them, and to see herself giving him time to say what was on his mind. She would deliberately prolong their conversations, invent reasons for him to call her again, or do other silly little things that she was puzzled to see herself doing, simply because she sensed what was going on inside him.

  She’d supposed that, as soon as he finally said ‘I love you’, she would smile and lean back into her chair. But she hadn’t. The spoken words had seemed different than they had in her imagination, and when they became a reality, she, too, became someone different from the person that had existed in her imagination – a person who wasn’t able to smile or lean back in the chair. All her limbs went cold, and she felt as though her neck was paralyzed. When she looked into his face, she knew for certain that he hadn’t slept for several nights, and that he’d resisted for a long time before speaking. Then at long last he’d sat across from her and said, ‘I love you, Leen. I’ve tried, but I can’t stand to keep it to myself any longer. There isn’t anything around me any more that doesn’t remind me of you. A couple of days ago I thought about you when I was stopped in front of a traffic light. I think about you all the time, actually, but when I was in front of that traffic light, I remembered your laugh. Why? I don’t know. In any case, I didn’t notice that the light had turned green, and I didn’t he
ar the cars behind me honking. Imagine! I swear to God, I wasn’t on Planet Earth. I was in some other place I don’t know anything about. I’d been completely ignorant of it until I met you. Would you believe it? I’ve started running away from people, from everything, so that I can be alone with you. I feel as though life is making fun of me. You know why? Because I used to make fun of love as it’s described by lovers in movies, soap operas and Arabic songs. And now here I am, doing and saying the things they do and say. So, make fun of me, Leen. Go ahead. Mock me. Maybe God will punish you and you’ll love me back!’

  She bowed her head, suddenly gripped by loneliness – how she hated that feeling – and all sorts of sensations and thoughts began churning deep inside her. But nothing frightened her as much as feeling suspended alone in the heart of a storm. She remembered how, a few days after that evening, she’d looked into his eyes for a second, and in them she had glimpsed every moment she had ever passed through alone: the moment she’d stood atop the remains of Bab al-Majidi as bulldozers plied the site; the moment she’d received her high-school diploma; the moment when, looking out through the window of a Boeing 747, she’d glimpsed the lights on Airport Road as the airplane took off with her for Jeddah where she would begin her studies at King Abdulaziz University; the moment she’d first walked into the girls’ dormitory; the moment she’d surrendered to a peculiar fit of weeping on the night before January 17, 1991; the moment she was told that her grandmother had passed away; the moment she’d stood with her classmates, decked out in a graduation sash and smiling even though she was thinking about her grandmother buried in the ground and wondering what remained of her after all those years; and the moment she’d seen Sharaf’s body being consumed by flames, so paralyzed by the shock at what she was seeing that she hadn’t done a thing.